By: Beatrice Aranton
|12 Jul 2019
Blogging has become a more common content marketing strategy people utilise nowadays. And although what you’ve written on your blog post is highly important for the reader, what could really convince a person to read it will be its title.
Picture this: in a sea of books about the success of millionaires, the one that sells the most is the one entitled “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. It sells because people are drawn to these types of success stories, and the title already seems to discuss a rags-to-riches kind of story that piques a reader’s interest.
Truth is, people judge blogs by their titles like how they judge books by their covers. Users want to have an idea what to expect upon clicking on your post. If you fail to catch their attention first-hand, users wouldn’t even bother looking further to see what you have written about.
There are various ways in spicing up your headlines. Before we get to that, let’s discuss the various types of blog titles you can depend on to compel readers to click on your post.
5 Different Types of Blog Titles
Scarcity Headlines
This type of headline starts off with a promise that the reader will be getting something few people have. “The Secret of…” or “Little Known Tips for…” are one of the examples for this type. It is the element of mystery at play here that makes your content more interesting to read.
Number Headlines
Starting your blog titles with numbers to introduce a list like “5 Ways on…” or “10 Useful Tips in…” helps your readers know what to expect, and how many things they can expect to learn while reading your post.
Big Promises Headlines
These are headlines that start with “The Ultimate Guide to…” and come with the assurance that the reader will be getting a lot of information if they click. This type markets itself as a one-stop guide to what the reader needs to know, but always ensure that you will deliver what you’re promising the reader would learn in the end.
Testimonial Headlines
Putting these titles such as “Is [something] good or bad?” is a formula that gets people to ask whether their practices are right or wrong. The beauty of using this type of headline is in intriguing your readers to think beyond what they think they already know, and reading through your post is the answer to what course they should take.
“How-To” Headlines
These headlines are effective because these keywords are usually what users type in when they search. If someone is trying to figure out how to do something, having a “How To” headline already lets them know that your post will deliver on what they need and gets the most important point across.
Found this article useful? Before reading on, don’t miss out on other related articles:
5 Strategies in Writing Effective Blog Titles
1. Be Relatable
Before you get into writing your blog, you should first know who your target audience is. You need to understand their personality to know the tone you’re going to use and to communicate with them in the most effective way.
You can always assume a formal tone for a more serious audience, or you could incorporate a bit of quirkiness to relate to a more casual reader. With the right tone, your readers will feel that you can relate to them, enabling you to immediately form a bond or a connection.
In making your titles relatable, you must consider how they would write it whenever they search for it on the internet. It’s important to stay in tune with recent trends to keep yourself up to date with how you should establish your tone to your target audience.
2. Be Creative
Write your headlines in a way that it would pique interest. Make your readers curious and make it sound as intriguing as possible. You can always go a little crazy with how you write your titles. After all, your blog is your stage and the spotlight is on your content. However, you must give your title the right amount of creative juices that wouldn’t make it sound a little way too overboard.
Writers, of course, would love to emphasise their point and market their content well, but this often leads to overselling what they write in a way that would make readers doubt your credibility. Remember that you’re free to think out of the box, but always stay accurate and factual.
3. Be Concise
A study has found out that at 8 seconds, humans have a shorter attention span than a goldfish.
Readers nowadays don’t have the time to analyse long titles and they may be quick to move on to things they can easily understand. So, you should think carefully about how you can best sell your content in a concise way without sacrificing the creativity of your headline.
Always keep it short and sweet as you only have one shot to prove your blog is worth their time before they scroll past it and click on something else.
4. Be Convincing
Make your readers believe that what you’ve written is informative and worth the read. Finish your titles with a promise your readers can’t resist. Making good use of numbers to enumerate your points is a good way to have readers willingly go over each one. This makes the article look like a list they can tick off each item from, giving them the feeling that they are a step closer to finding out what they want.
5. Be Specific
You need to set clear expectations for your readers. When doing so, you must ask yourself: What message am I trying to get across? What questions am I looking to answer? You can also start your titles with how, why, or what since they are a great way of showing how specific you are with your chosen topic.
The questions mentioned above cater to how users search, and it’s good to formulate your title with a tone that relates to them. Be sure to carefully state your objectives in writing your blog so that your readers would know exactly what to expect upon seeing your blog title.
Make Meaningful Headlines with Verz
Blogs with good titles aim to be noticed and read, but excellent and effective blog titles aim to be read, shared, and ranked high up the search engine results. Making your headlines SEO-friendly helps a lot in boosting its web visibility. So be sure to effectively integrate keywords or phrases as well to make a maximum impact on your audience.
Verz Design believes that the process of planning for effective blog writing does not stop at writing and providing all the useful information in one post. While writing the title of your blog seems like a small part of the whole process of content marketing, it is where each post’s overall success heavily relies on.
Allow us to help you engage your readers even further with the expertise of our professional web copywriters.
Jumpstart your blogs the best way. Call us at 6841 1680 or email us at enquiry@verzdesign.com for a free consultation!
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